Staging a Comeback

Vanguard Theatre Ensemble may set a record with “Lonely Planet”--its first play of 2001--for most chairs deployed as props in an Orange County production.

The drama by Steven Dietz has two characters and 25 to 30 chairs--wicker, rocking, plastic, chrome-and-vinyl, Shaker, you name it. It follows a Vanguard show, “Keely & Du,” that may have set a different record at the Fullerton theater: fewest chairs occupied during a play’s run.

“Keely,” a 1993 Pulitzer Prize finalist, is a dark, confrontational drama about antiabortion zealots holding a rape victim captive to prevent her from, as they see it, killing her baby.

Most theatrical fare during the holiday season brings tidings of comfort and joy. Vanguard gambled that many playgoers would want an alternative. Despite good reviews, it lost the bet.

“It was one of the best shows we’ve done, I think, but it didn’t work out,” said Wade Williamson, Vanguard’s artistic director and director of “Keely & Du.” Williamson wouldn’t say just what the average attendance was, but he said that one performance was canceled because nobody bought a ticket and nights of single-digit attendance were not uncommon.

The box office failure has already had repercussions. Nicky Silver’s comedy “Raised in Captivity,” described in Vanguard’s 2001 season announcement as “a severely skewed play” about a gay man in therapy, has been bumped from its November-December slot. In its place the company is considering reviving “Home for the Holidays,” a home-grown evening of skits, vignettes and songs that had done well before.

Vanguard is not ducking issue-oriented plays. As “Lonely Planet” unfolds, we learn that all those empty chairs stand for lives lost in the AIDS epidemic. Williamson says he can’t recall the Vanguard, which seats 58 to 68 depending on the stage configuration, having done an AIDS-themed play since it opened in 1992. It did stage “The Shadow Box,” a 1970s-era drama about a hospice where a gay man is among the characters dying of unspecified diseases.

In “Lonely Planet,” the character collecting all the chairs is Carl, a funny but enigmatic fellow who spins contradictory tall tales about what he does for a living. He drops off the furniture at a map store run by his friend Jody. Jody has gone into virtual seclusion in his little shop, hiding from the dangerous, morally demanding world outside. The play’s dramatic thread, interspersed with some funny bits, concerns Carl’s attempt to bring his buddy back to the world.

Director Sharyn Case considers the piece less an AIDS play than one about the nature of friendship and the legacies left by ordinary people.

“Lonely Planet,” first produced in 1993, dispenses with depictions of debilitating symptoms and deathbed scenes common to such better-known AIDS-related stories as the Tom Hanks film “Philadelphia” and playwright Tony Kushner’s landmark political-cultural epic “Angels in America.” Dietz, a prolific, much-produced, Seattle-based playwright, does not use the words “AIDS” or “HIV” in his script.

Dietz’s wide-ranging body of more than 20 plays includes “God’s Country,” about a neo-Nazi cell’s 1984 assassination of Alan Berg, a shock-radio host in Denver. Among his other works are “Private Eyes,” about an actress’ extramarital affair; the children’s play “Still Life With Iris” and adaptations of “Dracula” and Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.”

“Lonely Planet” works mainly via metaphor and indirection, but it still delivers telling indictments of prejudice against gays. Case, a veteran actress and director who lives in Costa Mesa, points to passages in which Jody (played by Vince Campbell) explains how all maps are compromises that inevitably distort geographical reality. Maps--which also are abundant on the Vanguard prop list--become the play’s metaphor for the distorted views that lead to prejudice. Carl (Paul Castellano) is more openly bitter as he recounts how a police officer friend was denied honors at his burial because he died of AIDS complications.

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Case is on a hot streak. Last year at Santa Ana’s Rude Guerrilla Theater Company, where she is a member, she directed a riveting production of “Terra Nova,” Ted Tally’s tragedy about doomed polar explorers. Also at Rude Guerrilla, she played three roles in a richly entertaining mounting of Clive Barker’s “The History of the Devil.”

The biggest challenge in “Lonely Planet,” she said, is striking a balance between humor and sadness.

“If you play it too heavy-handed, you wind up with something that’s almost unpalatable. And if you play it too light, you end up with something that’s offensive.”

A running joke in the script concerns the size of Chad on the map. That alone could elicit laughs unforeseen before the recent presidential election.

“I was so focused on the context of the play that I hadn’t thought about dimpled chad or hanging chad,” Case said. She will take the extra chuckles, even if they are out of context. “We need all the humor we can get. If we don’t, we can get bathos.”

The director does not feel added pressure to make “Lonely Planet” audience-friendly after the box office failure of “Keely & Du.”

“I admire the work [Vanguard] has done. I admire them for doing two issues-driven plays back-to-back. They do plays they are passionate about, and people come, for the most part.”

Often on the local circuit of small, hand-to-mouth, grass-roots theaters, a single box-office bomb can shake a company’s financial foundations. Vanguard has some leeway, thanks to BMC Software, which has anted up a season sponsorship grant of at least $25,000.

The theater’s season has more challenging works in store, including Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” and the lesbian drama, “Last Summer at Bluefish Cove.” But the mix also includes proven crowd-pleasing comedies in Steve Martin’s “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” and Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off” as well as “Foxfire,” based on a popular series of books about life in the rural South.

Figuring out how to promote the more demanding works is one of the Vanguard’s challenges for the year, Williamson said. “We just don’t have the time or energy right now to spend on marketing, but that will change.”

During the run of “Keely & Du,” he said, “I started referring to [the theater] as a little museum. If nobody comes, well, it’s still art. But the audiences . . . are why we’re there. We’re not there for ourselves. I was proud of the show, but that’s not why I produce theater.”

SHOW TIMES

“Lonely Planet,” Vanguard Theatre Ensemble, 699-A S. State College Blvd., Fullerton, in the College Business Park. Opens 8 tonight. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays 5 p.m. $13 to $15. $5 student rush tickets at curtain time. Ends Feb. 17. (714) 526-8007.